kara will remember the companion poems we wrote on 'heaven' - mine chasing down the austere, the firm, the crystalline vision of perfection; hers embracing all the vibrant earthy messiness of the living. always, but especially after the experiment of writing those poems, i've harbored a sense of my own weakness and shortcomings for having such a restrictive sense of aesthtics - though in honesty, my sense of beauty isn't entirely about immobile lifeless forms. it's not so much the range of things i find beautiful that concerns me about myself and my attachment to this living world, but rather, how closely the concepts of beauty and value are tied for me. I find a great many things beautiful that others might not choose to associate with the concept of beauty - but there are not so many things that i don't associate with beauty and yet still value.
i've been thinking about this more today having listened to an album (Jewel's second) i haven't heard since sophomore year in college, which has definite moment of beauty. On a psychological level this album, i discovered, has the ability to immediately return to me the pervasive melancholy that got me listening to it in the first place, but beyond that I noticed that these moments of beauty aren't so much in her execution but in the timbre of the notes and the release their resonance within my rib cage brings. it's this sensation that i find beautiful. well, yes, but we know this about me and song.
another recent activity reminding me of this beauty hang-up is my attempts at sketching. far from expecting any of these to be good, i at most hope that the collection of them will chart some progress. given that, you would think that i'd be able to try to sketch any object that has some trait i'm working on getting better at rendering, but not so...even knowing my own execution will be clumsy, i can't bring myself to sketch arrangements i don't find beautiful. and when i can't find some focused bit that i do find beauty in - that's it, i'm done till i find something else. which was the issue with the last dr sketchy's by the by...
[and i gotta run, so there ya go, another incomplete post]
anyway. i've lost my point somewhere in the breaks i took writing this today.
:) Yes, I do remember...and I think you don't give yourself enough credit. I'll call you later.
Posted by: Kara | Monday, 14 May 2007 at 13:32